Dr. Marvin Wachman (1917-2007) was a great advocate for educating young people. In a distinguished academic career, he served as president of both Temple University and Lincoln University and led the Foreign Policy Research Institute as president from 1983 to 1989. Throughout his life, he remained a passionate believer that “you never stop learning.”
Established in 1990, the Wachman Center is dedicated to improving international and civic literacy for high school teachers and high school students.

December 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Soviet Russia. Both dates give reason to reexamine the history of Eurasia, a vast region with many ethnic groups and multiple religions, at times united under authoritarian governments, at other times divided between dozens of countries.

Scholars in the News

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have entered into “a cycle of escalation” over the latter’s nuclear threats (targeting Guam). Both sides are indulging in “belligerent rhetoric,” to appeal to different domestic constituencies, according to Jacques deLisle, a professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School […]

Sputnik News When the Hamilton 68 website was launched on August 3 it was heralded as a potential game-changer. The site’s founder, former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, told the Business Insider website it would “track Russian propaganda in near-real time.” Nineteen days later, what has it come up with? The people behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard claimed they were able to track […]

NPR This week, it was Steve Bannon’s turn, the latest White House staffer to lose his job. A Twitter campaign this month, though, would’ve had the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, ousted instead. You may have seen the hashtag on Twitter #FireMcMaster. Turns out there was a Russian hand in the mix. The #FireMcMaster hashtag […]

CNBC “From my perspective, the difference in terms of what happened here wasn’t what the president said, but it’s what Jim Mattis said: If you launch a missile our way, ‘game on,’” said Edward Turzanski, an international policy and national security expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank in Philadelphia. “Jim Mattis […]

South China Morning Post In an editorial published hours before the signing ceremony, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said Washington’s threat to investigate China’s trade practices would “harm mutually beneficial China-US trade ties and ultimately hurt American consumers”. The investigation “will lead to tension and it will cause pain” for companies invested in China, Arthur […]

Hamilton 68 Dashboard at the Alliance for Securing Democracy displays in near real time what Vladimir Putin wants American audiences talking about in social media. The page captures Twitter feeds showcasing two things: 1) Russia’s overt, state sponsored propaganda aimed at English speaking audiences and 2) Content promoted by Bots and Trolls linked to Russian influence […]

Wired “It’s the same playbook they used in the Cold War era,” says Clint Watts, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In the 2016 election, he says, Russia “just used a digital battlefield instead of an analog one. They didn’t do anything in terms of strategic doctrine that was different. It was just […]

CBS Philly Foreign policy analyst Ed Turzanski told Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that Donald Trump’s reaction to North Korea’s nuclear saber-rattling is a needless escalation to a potential international crisis. “The President yesterday, his supporters may say, you tell him Donald, we’re going to rain fire on your behinds, it’s not helpful. You ought […]

Notably, it appears to remove parts of the old sanctions that aimed to avoid “adverse humanitarian consequences” for civilians, Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, observed on the North Korean Economy Watch blog. “In sum, the new resolution appears much more holistic than its predecessors in fully cutting off North Korea’s most central export […]

Jeremy Black. Air Power: A Global History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 386 pp. $38.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4422-5096-3. Reviewed by Mike Hankins (Kansas State University) Published on H-War (August, 2017) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey The field of air power history, much like the airplanes it studies, is in a state of fast evolution. Older works that focus almost entirely on […]

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The Foreign Policy Research Institute, founded in 1955, is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests. In the tradition of our founder, Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, Philadelphia-based FPRI embraces history and geography to illuminate foreign policy challenges facing the United States. More about FPRI »